Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (20 page)

A small but growing community of prominent journalists, scientists, elected officials, academics, judges, lawyers, and other impassioned souls, along with the Catholic Church, all advocated the abolishment of forced sterilizations and other forms of negative eugenics. In the mid-1930s they found an unlikely ally in a poor, one-footed former chicken thief named Jack T. Skinner.

On July 31, 1934, the frail, five-foot-six-inch Skinner limped up
to the Paris-Cope Service Station at 735 North Harvey in Oklahoma City and robbed the attendant of $17 at gunpoint. Caught and tried, Skinner was sentenced to ten years at McAlester Prison. While he was behind bars, Oklahoma passed a law compelling “habitual” criminals—anyone with three convictions or more—to be sterilized, and the state picked Skinner to undergo a mandatory vasectomy because he’d committed two other crimes. The first was a misdemeanor for stealing chickens (although not commendable, this wasn’t exactly unheard-of during the Great Depression), and specifics about the second offense aren’t known, but apparently it wasn’t serious enough to warrant much prison time.

Skinner fought the punishment in court, paying his counseling fees with money pooled by fellow inmates. Pure selflessness was not, it’s safe to assume, their prime motivation; they knew that if Skinner lost, they’d be next.

After the Oklahoma Supreme Court upheld the law, Skinner’s attorney, Claud Briggs, doubted that the U.S. Supreme Court would even consider the case, let alone rule in Skinner’s favor. Two new lawyers, Guy Andrews and H. I. Aston, joined the defense team and were more optimistic. Aston rushed to Washington and submitted an appeal on the very day of the Court’s deadline, October 8, 1941. Although by this time Skinner had already been released from McAlester for good behavior, Oklahoma’s assistant attorney general, Owen Watts, stated that, free or not, Skinner was still eligible for the chopping block, so to speak. On January 12, 1942, the Court agreed to hear
Skinner v. Oklahoma
.

Several legal principles were at issue, including cruel and unusual punishment, double jeopardy (that is, being penalized twice for the same crime), and the ex post facto nature of Oklahoma’s law, in that it was passed after Skinner had been convicted for the third time. But the Court justices zeroed in on an argument first emphasized by the McAlester inmates themselves: Why should chicken thieves be sterilized and not embezzlers, who were exempt from the law?

When Justice Felix Frankfurter posed this exact question to Oklahoma’s attorney general, Mac Williamson, during the May 6, 1942, oral arguments, Williamson replied, “There are elements of violence in stealing chickens.”

“Not if done surreptitiously,” interjected Chief Justice Harlan Stone, who fifteen years earlier had sided with the majority in
Buck v. Bell
, the infamous ruling that forced Carrie Buck and her young daughter to be sterilized. Williamson had no real answer to Stone’s remark.

Skinner prevailed 9–0.

What most undermined Oklahoma’s sterilization law, Justice William Douglas wrote in the Court’s June 1, 1942, decision, was “its failure to meet the requirements of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” and he specifically delved into the chicken-stealing/embezzling comparison. On this the Court was in general agreement. But Douglas thought it necessary to add the following:

Across the Atlantic, those evil and reckless hands were already hard at work. In the summer of 1942, the Nazis had constructed fewer than one hundred concentration, labor, and extermination camps. Within two years, there were thousands of them.

Oklahoma v. Skinner
did not officially reverse
Buck v. Bell
—which has yet to be overturned—or halt sterilizations in the United States, only “punitive” ones. But it represented the first major legal ruling against eugenics and lent enormous moral authority to its opponents. Along with the Court’s warning on how such practices could
lead to wholesale genocide (the irrefutable proof of which was revealed to the world after Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945), it also fortified the Fourteenth Amendment’s “equal protection” clause and prompted certain legislation to be more “strictly scrutinized” to ensure that minority rights were being protected. As obvious as this sounds today, it was frighteningly less so generations ago.

Any number of locations could have served as a springboard to tell Skinner’s story: his birthplace in Shawnee, Oklahoma; McAlester Prison; the county or state courthouses that first tried his case; or his grave in Tulare County, California, where he died at the age of seventy-seven, survived by six grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. For me, the site of Skinner’s botched holdup, which precipitated the constitutional legal fight, seemed a more offbeat and memorable choice and no less appropriate than the others. When I arrived at 735 North Harvey, where the Paris-Cope Service Station had been in 1934, it became all the more relevant.

Today, the site is a parking lot connected to a modern office building. Only three stories tall, the squat cement structure exudes a fortresslike impenetrability. The windows are thick and tinted green. Bulletproof. Brown metal poles topped with security cameras line the street. In front of the sleek all-glass entrance is a steel sign that reads
GENERAL SERVICES ADMINISTRATION
. But I know what this building is and why it’s here. Whatever its official name might be now, it is, for all intents and purposes, the new Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

The old Murrah Building had, of course, stood across the street until the morning of April 19, 1995. At 9:02
A.M.
a Ryder van packed with almost five thousand pounds of a diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate fertilizer mix exploded outside the nine-story building, killing 149 adults and 19 children. More than 320 buildings within a sixteen-block radius were damaged, and the blast could be heard in Stillwater, Oklahoma, some fifty-three miles away.

Coming two years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,
which was orchestrated and funded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (Osama bin Laden’s partner in crime), the attack was initially blamed on Islamic extremists. But FBI agents traced the Ryder’s identification number from a mangled axle back to a twenty-seven-year-old American named Timothy McVeigh, and the manhunt for McVeigh was on.

Incredibly, he was already in custody—for what began as a minor traffic violation. At around 10:30
A.M.
, a state trooper had pulled McVeigh over for driving without a rear license plate and ended up arresting him for possessing an unregistered gun. McVeigh was being booked when the Wanted bulletin came over the wires, and Oklahoma police, stunned that he was right in front of them, contacted the FBI.

During an inspection of McVeigh’s car, detectives found, among a trove of incriminating evidence, photocopied pages from William Luther Pierce’s
The Turner Diaries
. Published in 1978, the novel glorifies overthrowing the U.S. government and inciting a race war by, first, blowing up federal buildings. Pierce’s description of an attack on the FBI’s Washington headquarters is uncannily similar to what happened at the Murrah Building, where the FBI had regional offices. Just as Madison Grant’s
The Passing of the Great Race
was a “bible” to Hitler,
The Turner Diaries
is practically a sacred text to neo-Nazis and has been linked to numerous killings. McVeigh, who sold the book at gun shows, cited it as an inspiration.

Whether or not Pierce ever read Grant isn’t known, though I’d be surprised if he hadn’t;
The Passing of the Great Race
is a classic among white supremacists. Regardless, the two men were kindred spirits who hated all the same people—blacks, Jews, immigrants, and most other minorities. Were he alive today, I’m sure Grant would be a dues-paying member of the National Alliance, the neo-Nazi organization Pierce founded in 1974.

While the impulse to excise men such as Pierce and Grant from our national autobiography with a hearty “Good riddance” is understandable, there’s a risk in doing so. Sanitizing history prevents us from seeing the warning signs of another Haun’s Mill, Mountain Meadows, or
Rock Springs. These incidents occurred so long ago they’re almost unreal now, and the idea that similar massacres and riots could take place in our own time seems impossible. Such atrocities always do—right up until the moment they happen again.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial, directly across the street from the new Murrah Building, is a powerful reminder of this. Book-ending a one-hundred-yard-long shallow pool are two massive bronze walls, each about four stories tall, called the Gates of Time. Etched into one is 9:01 and the other 9:03. Between them, where the Murrah Building used to be, is a vast, empty space that forces the mind to reflect on what happened at 9:02. I begin walking the length of the pool to look at both gates up close.

Most affecting, I think, are the memorial’s 168 chairs, arranged by where the victims were sitting when the truck exploded. Nineteen of them, for the children, are smaller than the rest.

I absentmindedly step off the paved walkway and onto the grass, where the chairs are situated.

“Oh, sorry,” I say to one of the park rangers, a guy in his twenties standing nearby. “Is it okay to walk on here?”

“You’re fine.”

While looking at the chairs more closely, I spot a discrepancy. “Why does that one have two names on it?” I ask the ranger.

The answer comes to me before he responds, but his reply is still a punch to the gut.

“There are three chairs like that,” he tells me, “for the women who were pregnant. The second names are for the babies.”

Unable to say anything, I just keep staring at the chairs.

“A lot of folks,” he continues, “walk right past them without even noticing, but when they do, it’s something I doubt they’ll forget. It’s the little things we almost miss that hit the hardest, you know?”

I do.

UNLIKE JACK SKINNER
, Marie Barnett was not a hard-core convicted felon looking to break the law for personal gain but an innocent soul caught up in a legal battle that also made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Actually, I didn’t know all of this for certain before calling Marie at her home in West Virginia, but I figured it was a safe bet that she didn’t have a criminal record when the Court took her case in 1943.

“How old were you at the time you got into trouble?” I asked Marie.

“I was nine.”

“And you and your sister Gathie were in the fifth grade?”

“Fourth.”

“Fourth grade, at Slip Hill Grade School?”

“That’s correct.”

On January 9, 1942, the West Virginia Board of Education, like many other public school boards across the United States, had made it mandatory for students to salute the American flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

Marie and her sister refused.

“It wasn’t that we weren’t patriotic,” Marie tells me. “Our faith teaches us to pledge allegiance only to God.”

They, like other Jehovah’s Witnesses, adhere to a literal reading of the Bible’s commandment in Exodus 20:3–5 that states:

“You and your sister weren’t arrested, though, right?”

“No, but our father was—because we weren’t in school, even though it was the principal who kept sending us home. He wasn’t very nice about it.”

Discrimination against Jehovah’s Witnesses (who, before 1931, were called Bible Students) dates back to the late 1800s, when their founder, a charismatic Pittsburgh haberdasher named Charles Taze Russell, preached that Armageddon was imminent and that Christ had already returned to earth “invisibly” in 1874 but would be back for real about four decades later. Russell also claimed that, due to divinely inspired climate change, global temperatures would rise and the world would revert to a balmy, Genesis-like state. Russell’s followers endured no end of insults, and this was before his successors encouraged door-to-door proselytizing, for which the Jehovah’s Witnesses are perhaps best known and most ridiculed.

Beginning in the summer of 1940, mockery turned to bloodshed when physical assaults against Witnesses surged nationwide. Triggering the violence was the June 3, 1940, Supreme Court ruling against Walter Gobitas, a Jehovah’s Witness from Minersville, Pennsylvania, who had told his children, Lillian and Billy, not to salute the flag or say the Pledge of Allegiance at school. They didn’t, and they were expelled.

Both a district judge and a U.S. Court of Appeals sided with Gobitas, but the school board continued fighting until the cases landed before the nine justices of the Supreme Court. When they handed down their decision in
Minersville School District v. Gobitis
(a lower court misspelled Gobitas, and the error stuck), the final tally wasn’t even close; 8–1 against Gobitas, with only Justice Harlan Stone dissenting. Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote the majority opinion. “National unity is the basis of national security,” he argued.